France's excuse -- the Bosnia debacle

WHEN FRENCH officials have been pressed to explain why they have agreed to provide only 200 troops to the 15,000-member international force intended to police the cease-fire agreement in Lebanon, they have fallen back on ancient peacekeeping history. We can't get entangled in another Bosnia, they protest. A number of other European nations have expressed similar reservations about sending troops, which puts the entire operation in peril.

Well, yes, Bosnia was very bad. Starting in 1992, U.N. peacekeepers -- mostly European -- were given a humanitarian mandate and deployed into the middle of a monstrous civil war. Sworn to preserve their own supposedly sacred neutrality, the peacekeepers watched helplessly while Serbs butchered Bosnian civilians. The U.N. force was overmatched, outgunned and ultimately humiliated.

But that was 11 years ago. Thanks in part to that shameful episode, and to debacles in Somalia in 1992-93 and Rwanda in 1994, the United Nations has learned quite a bit about peacekeeping. It has grown accustomed to intervening between states and warlords, to wading into chaotic situations, to soberly assessing likely threats, and to bringing real force to bear in the face of menace.

There still have been dreadful failures of will and of tactics, but important successes as well. In Sierra Leone, peacekeepers protected a desperately beleaguered government, disarmed rebels and have now withdrawn in favor of a national army and police force. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indian and Pakistani troops along the eastern border use helicopter gunships against the militias that terrorize the region. They've scarcely pacified the area, but last month their forceful presence made it possible for Congo to hold its first election in 40 years.

In the pre-Bosnia era, peacekeeping was a rather genteel affair, and soldiers from Canada, Poland, Sweden, Ireland and other Western nations made up the "glue" of each mission. But in the aftermath of the nightmares of the 1990s, Western military officials lost their enthusiasm for U.N. missions. Peacekeeping became, with a few exceptions, a Third World affair. (An EU force that is currently working in support of U.N. troops in Congo is one of those exceptions.) Third World armies, but not Western ones, have assimilated the protocols of "robust peacekeeping" over the last five or six years.